The increasing availability of these kinds of tools raise concerns and questions for Doug Levin, founder of EdTech Strategies.acial-recognition police tools have been decried as “staggeringly inaccurate.”

acial-recognition police tools have been decried as “staggeringly inaccurate.”School web filters can also impact low-income families inequitably, he adds, especially those that use school-issued devices at home. #equity.

As in the insurance industry, much of the impetus (and sales pitches) in the school and online safety market can be driven by fear. But voicing such concerns and red flags can also steer the stakeholders toward dialogue and collaboration.

In a recent article for The Verge titled “The Trauma Floor: The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America,” a dozen current and former employees of one of the company’s contractors, Cognizant, talked to Newton about the mental health costs of spending hour after hour monitoring graphic content.

Perhaps the most surprising find from his investigation, the reporter said, was how the majority of the employees he talked to started to believe some of the conspiracy theories they reviewed.

FBI Warns Educators and Parents About Edtech’s Cybersecurity Risks

The FBI has released a public service announcement warning educators and parents that edtech can create cybersecurity risks for students.

In April 2017, security researchers found a flaw in Schoolzilla’s data configuration settings. And in May 2017, a hacker reportedly stole 77 million user accounts from Edmodo.

Amelia Vance, the director of the Education Privacy Project at the Future of Privacy Forum, writes in an email to EdSurge that the FBI likely wanted to make sure that as the new school year starts, parents and schools are aware of potential security risks. And while she thinks it’s “great” that the FBI is bringing more attention to this issue, she wishes the public service announcement had also addressed another crucial challenge.

“Schools across the country lack funding to provide and maintain adequate security,” she writes. “Now that the FBI has focused attention on these concerns, policymakers must step up and fund impactful security programs.”

According to Vance, a better approach might involve encouraging parents to have conversations with their children’s’ school about how it keeps student data safe.

Schools are using AI to track what students write on their computers

Under the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), any US school that receives federal funding is required to have an internet-safety policy. As school-issued tablets and Chromebook laptops become more commonplace, schools must install technological guardrails to keep their students safe. For some, this simply means blocking inappropriate websites. Others, however, have turned to software companies like Gaggle, Securly, and GoGuardian to surface potentially worrisome communications to school administrators

Over 50% of teachers say their schools are one-to-one (the industry term for assigning every student a device of their own), according to a 2017 survey from Freckle Education

But even in an age of student suicides and school shootings, when do security precautions start to infringe on students’ freedoms?

When the Gaggle algorithm surfaces a word or phrase that may be of concern—like a mention of drugs or signs of cyberbullying—the “incident” gets sent to human reviewers before being passed on to the school. Using AI, the software is able to process thousands of student tweets, posts, and status updates to look for signs of harm.

SMPs help normalize surveillance from a young age. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal at Facebook and other recent data breaches from companies like Equifax, we have the opportunity to teach kids the importance of protecting their online data

in an age of increased school violence, bullying, and depression, schools have an obligation to protect their students. But the protection of kids’ personal information is also a matter of their safety

Recovering Keyboard Inputs through Thermal Imaging

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, are able to recover user passwords by way of thermal imaging. The tech is pretty straightforward, but it’s interesting to think about the types of scenarios in which it might be pulled off.

Are your phone camera and microphone spying on you?

Felix Krause described in 2017 that when a user grants an app access to their camera and microphone, the app could do the following:

Access both the front and the back camera.

Record you at any time the app is in the foreground.

Take pictures and videos without telling you.

Upload the pictures and videos without telling you.

Upload the pictures/videos it takes immediately.

Run real-time face recognition to detect facial features or expressions.

Livestream the camera on to the internet.

Detect if the user is on their phone alone, or watching together with a second person.

Upload random frames of the video stream to your web service and run a proper face recognition software which can find existing photos of you on the internet and create a 3D model based on your face.

For instance, here’s a Find my Phone application which a documentary maker installed on a phone, then let someone steal it. After the person stole it, the original owner spied on every moment of the thief’s life through the phone’s camera and microphone.

The government

Edward Snowden revealed an NSA program called Optic Nerves. The operation was a bulk surveillance program under which they captured webcam images every five minutes from Yahoo users’ video chats and then stored them for future use. It is estimated that between 3% and 11% of the images captured contained “undesirable nudity”.

Hackers

Hackers can also gain access to your device with extraordinary ease via apps, PDF files, multimedia messages and even emojis.

An application called Metasploit on the ethical hacking platform Kali uses an Adobe Reader 9 (which over 60% of users still use) exploit to open a listener (rootkit) on the user’s computer. You alter the PDF with the program, send the user the malicious file, they open it, and hey presto – you have total control over their device remotely.

Once a user opens this PDF file, the hacker can then:

Install whatever software/app they like on the user’s device.

Use a keylogger to grab all of their passwords.

Steal all documents from the device.

Take pictures and stream videos from their camera.

Capture past or live audio from the microphone.

Upload incriminating images/documents to their PC, and notify the police.

And, if it’s not enough that your phone is tracking you – surveillance cameras in shops and streets are tracking you, too

You might even be on this website, InSeCam, which allows ordinary people online to watch surveillance cameras free of charge. It even allows you to search cameras by location, city, time zone, device manufacturer, and specify whether you want to see a kitchen, bar, restaurant or bedroom.

“They do plan,” said a senior Obama-administration official. “They’re not stupid at all. But the idea that they have this all perfectly planned and that Putin is an amazing chess player—that’s not quite it. He knows where he wants to end up, he plans the first few moves, and then he figures out the rest later. People ask if he plays chess or checkers. It’s neither: He plays blackjack. He has a higher acceptance of risk. Think about it. The election interference—that was pretty risky, what he did. If Hillary Clinton had won, there would’ve been hell to pay.”

Even the manner of the Russian attack was risky. The fact that the Russians didn’t really bother hiding their fingerprints is a testament to the change in Russia’s intent toward the U.S., Robert Hannigan, a former head of the Government Communications Headquarters, the British analogue to the National Security Agency, said at the Aspen Forum. “The brazen recklessness of it … the fact that they don’t seem to care that it’s attributed to them very publicly, is the biggest change.”

French privacy watchdog raps WhatsApp over Facebook data sharing

France’s data privacy watchdog may fine messaging app WhatsApp if it does not comply with an order to bring its sharing of user data with parent company Facebook into line with French privacy law.

Separately, Germany’s cartel office said on Tuesday it had found Facebook had abused its dominant market position, in a ruling that questioned the company’s model of monetizing the personal data of its users through targeted advertising.